Spore sprouts a new world, growing and changing in unexpected ways. Part game, part design program, and always playful, Spore leads you on a journey from tiny creature to colonizer of the galaxy. You create the experience as much as the developers at EA’s Maxis studio; you build the main creature, vehicles, structures, and even adapt whole planets along the way. And your choices determine your path; choosing an herbivore mouth for an early creature might eventually lead you to form a peaceful society that negotiates its way out of trouble.

If not for the licensing rights, SolarQuest could have been called Star Trek: Shuttlecraft Run. As the pilot of the Delta Flyer—er, nameless spacecraft—it’s your job to race from one end of an intergalactic obstacle course to the other, gathering power-ups and extra points as you go. Just try not to get distracted by all the eye candy.

After more than 20 years, Rob Reiner’s 1987 fractured fairy tale The Princess Bride holds up as a fun and funny movie for the whole family. Now Worldwide Biggies has brought the story—including the voice talents of Robin Wright Penn (Buttercup), Wallace Shawn (Vizzini), and Mandy Patinkin (Inigo Montoya)—to your Mac, translated into five different casual and point-and-click game styles slotted between animated videos that trace the plot.

Mac users have traditionally drawn the short straw when it comes to games. The Mac has plenty of good titles, but not nearly the variety as Windows. With Macs gaining popularity and market share, bigger game publishers like EA have been releasing games for Mac OS X, but many others are holding out. This is where CrossOver Games comes in.

Part WALL-E and part Spider-Man, Toy Bot swings, spins, and hurtles through a world of puzzles and perils in Toy Bot Diaries. Cute art, great music, and accelerometer-powered gameplay put a fresh face on the game’s familiar elements, but Toy Bot Diaries is almost undone by one exasperating control issue.

Quordy is a Boggle-like word game that gives players three minutes to create as many words as possible out of adjacent letters. The longer the word, the higher the score. But before you play, you first have to scramble the digital tiles by giving your iPhone a shake, like a word-nerd James Bond making a vodka martini.